On-brand, at scale: Driving performance with AI creative

This is really about taking the cost, um, the burden of creative development off your plate, having the tools available to you, and having you realize the performance gains in terms of conversions or conversion value. — I'm Ginny Marvin as product liaison at Google, and this is Ads Decoded. Creative is often the most time-consuming part of any campaign, and its ability to make or break your success is as relevant as ever. Today, we're tackling the creative burden from pressure to produce endless aspect ratios for YouTube ads to the fear that generative AI will lead to a sea of sameness. Joining me are two returning experts, Charles Boyd, who works on creative automation tools and workflows, and Sarah Hathiramani, specializing in YouTube ads and Demand Gen. We're going to learn about creative features in AI Max, PMax, and Demand Gen, and tools like VO to build brand fidelity at scale. How to really use ad strength, and we'll discuss features that many of you have been asking for, including text disclaimers. Welcome, Charles and Sarah. I'm so excited to be spending the next, many minutes talking about creative. And I want to first start by asking you how you're seeing the role of creative change in performance campaigns, or if you're seeing the role play a different level of importance. So, right now, my team is spending a lot of time thinking about how we bring targeting and creative together to drive the performance for campaigns. And so, I think there's a shift right now that you see, uh, particularly if you have AI Max on with text customization and final URL expansion, where bringing all of those things together helps really drive the performance because you can target the right consumer in the right moment with the right landing page and with the right message. You know, for YouTube, there's really such a diverse set of experiences across, you know, connected TV devices, landscape videos on desktop, vertical content on shorts. So, it's always really important to have creative that is delivered in all of the aspect ratios that are needed to make sure all of that inventory is available to you as an advertiser. And I think what's really changed over the last year or two, it's increasingly easier for Google to help reduce the cost on your advertiser side and instead lean on the tools in Google Ads and otherwise to make sure you're taking care of that inventory eligibility without having to shoulder the cost yourself. Great. And I do I want to talk about a lot of those tools as we dive deeper building on what you're talking about AI Max. AI Max is still grounded in responsive search ads and I just want to get a bit of a level set on how assets work in responsive search ads. I get the questions of how can I tell if my asset is actually performing? You know, maybe it's getting uh relatively small number of impressions, but there are conversions. So, how should advertisers understand whether to it's time to swap something out or something's actually reaching an audience that is important? In the specific scenario you outlined, if you're seeing an asset that's getting a small number of impressions, but conversions, it's probably reaching a really niche audience. And so, that asset is probably really valuable when it serves in combination with other assets. But, on the flip side, if you're seeing something that's uh a little different, you're not seeing many, if at all, uh many impressions, and no conversions to go along with it after uh a few weeks, this probably means that's an asset that's not winning the auction, or is not uh serving very well in combination with other assets. And that's when you would really want to look at swapping out the assets. I don't recommend, you know, just purely trimming the assets. I recommend replacing the asset with uh other assets that would create more what we call unique combinations. So, that's really the name of the game uh is unique combinations of assets that can appeal to different searches in a variety of combinations. And I think also one of the things um we're often talking about reaching perhaps multiple types of audiences within one ad group or ad, right? So, when you're building out your assets in a um in a responsive search ad, should you really be thinking

about that breadth to be reaching a diversity of searches, and with that, the types of users who may be in different um different phases of the purchase journey? Yeah, I would say absolutely yes. Like, you should be thinking about the wide variety of searches that people would have, and AI Max is one of the ways that you can achieve some of those um searches and unique combinations. And it's not just uh I would say a unique set of assets, having a variety of landing pages in the same — [clears throat] — ad group is also really important. So, we'd strongly encourage uh having a few RSAs that have different uh landing pages, and then also having AI Max on with text customization and final URL expansion will help really expand the number of relevant searches that you would have been missing before. And AI max will help direct the consumers to the right landing page based on what they're searching for. So, it can kind of mix and match all of the different combinations of RSAs within one ad group to hit all of those really unique types of searches. That's actually really important to hit on cuz it's somewhat new guidance to be having multiple landing pages multiple responsive search ads in an ad group. I want to talk about ad strength. It's another area that we get a lot of questions about and what it is, what it's actually indicating, and how it should inform your creative input. I think of ad strength really as a diagnostic metric to let you know if you're set up for success. So, for example, in PMAX ad strength is going to indicate whether you're reaching all the different slots and formats that are allowing you to access all the potential impressions as well as an indication of the different diversity of the assets available in a particular ad group. And we found that when you have all of these elements in place, you get more performance at a similar ROI. And so, it uses an algorithm mathematical algorithm called cosine similarity to just give you like a quick indication of how unique are each of the headlines or the descriptions. How many unique combinations can you make with those? And so, that's the way ad strength works under the hood to give you real-time feedback, but it's not necessarily indicating performance in the sense that you know, we're really looking for assets as we talked about earlier that can appeal to different types of searches. You need to sort of like use some of your own intuition to look through the assets and see if those pieces are all there. — Yeah, cuz often times people say, "Well, I have an ad that has relatively lower ad strength, but it's converting, so Right. that must mean that ad strength doesn't mean anything. And it's sort of the same thing that — Right. uh often times you see keywords that have a lower quality score that are converting. Um and so it doesn't mean that ad strength is um wrong, it's just it's telling you about your um propensity for discovery, right? Um Yeah, exactly. And I mean, we see that customers that improve their ad strengths tend to have better outcomes, right? Because you're generally you're reaching new inventory. Um and that gives you a new place to reach a customer at a similar cost that you may not have had before. Use it as that diagnostic to know when you have headroom in your creative to improve your performance. Great. Anything you want to add on that, Sarah? I would say uh ad strength is important uh but insufficient to give you a complete picture. Why it's important: ad strength allows you to understand how well an ad follows our asset coverage best practices for optimal performance. So that's essentially saying that ad strength is all about inventory eligibility. Uh this means that your images and your videos have to cover all the aspect ratios. Demand gen is going to work best when you use many different creative assets and aspect ratios, ensuring you reach viewers across all of those diversified sets of YouTube viewer experiences that I mentioned earlier: connected TV, landscape video, image ads in a feed, vertical content on shorts, um just to name a few. I view it as the price of entry, but you really want to go beyond ad strength. I would take a look at the YouTube ads leaderboard to better understand the types of creative messages that are also resonating with certain types of

audiences across different business objectives. Great. And that the leaderboard is um the index of ads that are performing Are they they're performing best or what is the indicator there? I would think about it as dashboard that allows you to sort and filter to find different types of creatives across various marketing objectives. You can drill down to look at advertisers that may have similar objectives that you may have. So, it's really an exploratory tool to help inspire your own creative process. Great. Great resource. Thank you for highlighting that. And while we're on that is the subject of being able to make the most of your assets, I want to talk about video enhancements. We've been adding features with the in-video enhancements. One latest one being voice over. So, I would just would love for you to talk a little bit about how video enhancements works and where advertisers are seeing the benefits and how they can still ensure that there is that the ads are being represented and created in ways that feel true to the brand. Absolutely. You know, we're launching video enhancements to reduce the advertiser burden and cost associated with creative development while simultaneously improving campaign performance. In other words, we wouldn't launch a video enhancement if we didn't have the data to prove and demonstrate that video enhancements improve campaign performance. Um according to a recent internal experiment, demand gen ads with video enhancement saw over a 16% increase in conversion value at the targeted ROI on YouTube. So, again, this is really about taking the cost um the burden of creative development off your plate, having the tools available to you, and having you realize the performance gains in terms of conversions or conversion value. Um on voiceovers, uh as you mentioned, we have started to roll out voiceovers in PMax. Um and generally speaking, quality is a very important factor in any and all creative enhancements. And of course, with the pace of innovation and the moment that we're in more broadly, quality is going to improve over time. And we're also going to explore um even more ways to make it clear to advertisers what the voiceover is going to sound like, um for example, with previews. And that's um you know, more emblematic and representative of a broader suite of what we call advertiser-in-the-loop solutions, where you have more transparency and control over the types of automations that will be applied. — If I'm not mistaken, the voiceover uh assets are coming from the advertiser-provided assets. It's not creating um its own script. It's pulling from their headlines and descriptions. So, there is control in terms of what that's what the voiceovers are grounded in. One of the big questions or concerns is with every advertiser now being able to use these same foundational models. We've got Gemini, got VEO, we've got Nano Banana. Um, with all of these tools now in the hands of advertisers, are we going to be seeing like a sea of sameness? And how should advertisers how can they um be able to ensure that their generative assets are um representative of their brands, helping differentiate their brands from their competitor landscape? I sort of see these tools as helping move actually in the opposite direction. Like helping brands stand out more. I think that's one of the superpowers of the generative tools that are available, you know, in Google Ads and Asset Studio, but more broadly is that the ability to create something that's uh unique very quickly and test a lot of uh various styles and iterations uh at scale. And there's tools in Google Ads to like really express your brand uh and provide the inputs you need in order to sort of feel the brand representation in the assets that are created. So, you'll see some of those in Asset Studio, but then also you can provide uh brand guidelines and you'll see even more of that this year as you turn on things like asset optimization. And so, Google more deeply understands your brand and we're starting with AI briefs. Um and you'll see more at GML on that front as well. Tara, I would love to

hear about VEO in Google Ads and how brands can sure that they're showing up with um their brand fidelity, differentiation with video. So, we're excited. We just uh put VEO in the hands of advertisers directly um through some solutions in Video Builder, Asset Studio, and, uh, basically what this is going to allow advertisers to do is select up to three images, and then use those images to generate five, 10-second videos. This is about image-only advertisers who've really been unable to unlock the full power of YouTube without having video assets. And instead of asking every advertiser to become an in-house video production company, uh, we're able to use VO to leverage automation while maintaining, uh, transparency and control, and the opportunity to express voice, in this case, through the three images that are provided by the brand. Great. Um, yeah, and I do I talk about this a lot is just the, um, that the and going back to what both of you have said, that the brands who are already great at distinguishing themselves, know their voice, have, um, the, um, the point of view that will then be able to be augmented with generative assets, and because so much it's grounded in what you know about your brand, that I do find it to be a really exciting time for, um, for branding to really be closely honed into driving performance for businesses. I want to go back, um, on to search, and we've recently announced that DSAs, uh, Dynamic Search Ads, will be transitioning into AI Max, and, um, for the time being, advertisers have controls and tools to make that transition themselves, which we strongly recommend doing before the auto migration starts happening in September. But, Charles, can you talk a little bit about the how AI Max differs from dynamic search ads and why we are feeling confident that that's going to be a um a performance at least net neutral if not um improvement for advertisers who've been investing in and loving DSAs for so many years. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think of uh AI Max is the evolution of DSA with some major upgrades. So, like the targeting, for example, um is not only just based off your landing page, but combines it with real-time intent signals and the uh asset optimization together. Um and it can tailor these assets to the specific user queries. Where DSA was going to just simply take uh assets straight from your landing page, um AI Max can uh adapt these assets to match the user's intent. So, in addition to those new features, you're going to see more controls, uh more reporting, and a simplified uh campaign workflow with AI Max. You're going to get deeper asset reports as well as the ability to provide guidelines, like text guidelines, uh with AI Max that you didn't have with uh dynamic search ads. And so, it's a huge Gemini-powered upgrade. — But, you brought up text guidelines, cuz I do want to talk about those and some of the um the steering that is getting built into AI Max and other um campaigns around asset guidance. We talked a little bit about it with um video enhancements. Can you talk about um text guidelines and we've um Um, also AI Briefs as part of that. I know we'll have more to talk about AI briefs at GML, but what can we share at this point? Yeah, so text guidelines are available today. Anyone can apply text guidelines in both search and P-Max. So let's say you're selling coats and you don't want them to ever be described as cheap or there's specific words that you would never use to describe the material. You can provide those guidelines to Google now as part of text guidelines. The way I think about it is there's sort of a default set of guidelines that are always on when you have text customization enabled in a AI Max campaign. So those are things like um like it's never going to give you a price, availability

sort of these sorts of information in a text asset, but you can come in and add on layer on your own guidelines. And you can I think you can specify up to 40 guidelines in a given campaign. And Google literally will check every asset that gets created against each one of the guidelines that you provide. And so this is a really powerful way to provide steering to Google about what types of content you do or don't want it to create, allow it to see that benefit that performance benefit of text customization. Like for example, we see customers on average that have AI Max on that then add on text customization and final URL expansion see 7% more conversions at a similar CPA or OS. And so like if you haven't used text customization or final URL expansion before because of brand concerns or the you know the ability to steer AI, this is a really powerful way to do that and see those performance benefits at the same time. And another piece of this that is um newly uh um rolling out are text disclaimers, which have been a huge ask for so long by um uh folks who need that disclaimer copy in their ads. So, would love to hear more about that and um where you who should be using it and how you think it will be um should be applied. Oh yeah, I'm really excited about the rollout for text disclaimers because like as you mentioned Ginny, it's been a big ask for a long time and we we've had the ability to pin assets, you know, like you can pin headlines, you can pin descriptions. Um but you couldn't use pin descriptions with final URL expansion. And so, disclaimers uh addresses that. So, if you specify a disclaimer for a uh search campaign the text you specify as the disclaimer is going to serve as the description no matter what. Uh you can turn on final URL expansion, text customization. That disclaimer is always going to serve as the first description line. It's really important to note though, if you have something pinned in the first description line, it will override what you have pinned there. Um and so, that's a pretty uh important note like you wouldn't be able to use both of those things together. Um — Okay. So, the text disclaimer will override your pinned description. — Exactly. And the pin description like could still serve if for example, uh the disclaimer was disapproved or you paused the disclaimer, um but when both are eligible, it's always going to override a pinned first description. Sarah, anything you want to add on that? Oh, I feel like we can all breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Finally. " We're so excited. Yes, it's really exciting. Uh on the demand gen side, we have had a limited pilot um to test in ad disclaimers across key YouTube formats. Um to date, this has been a pretty small-scale pilot, but of course we have the same ambitions that um Charles mentioned are coming to be on the search side. Um we started with a small uh pilot to really deeply understand the needs of healthcare advertisers in particular. Um these uh folks have concrete legal requirements around the disclaimer information that they need to convey on the ads, and we're looking forward to reflecting these learnings into a more widely available offering for advertisers across sensitive verticals coming later this year. I know um making a lot of advertisers very happy with this. I want to talk a little bit about product feeds. We just did uh a couple of episodes ago a deep dive in retail. So, if you are um working in retail, highly recommend checking out that episode. We talked a lot about um product data and the importance of it, but I feel like we'd be remiss not to mention product feeds and the importance from a um creative standpoint that they play for retail um advertisers. Uh Sarah, can you just talk a little bit about the shoppable formats for YouTube, and if there are other considerations that um advertisers need to be keeping in mind from the um product data side of things? It is so important uh if you are a retailer and you have a Google Merchant Center product feed set up to make sure that information is up-to-date and filled with high-fidelity information um because it really can supercharge your creative. Um the example that I think about uh are things like promotion assets or installment offers. So, I would really think about where you have the opportunity to relay

something unique that other parts of the ads ecosystem can't communicate for you. The other thing I'd mention is the Google Merchant Center continues to be this really important source of truth not only for installment offers, promotion assets, the quality of the SKUs and the represent representative nature of the SKUs in terms of what's available really at your web or storefront. But also the videos today on In-Demand Gen, you can only run, you know, five video ads at a time. And as a retailer, you might have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of SKUs in your GMC product feed. Wouldn't it be amazing if you had videos mapped to each one of those products? And on In-Demand Gen, we could break this constraint of five and instead say, "Since we have intelligence that this user is in market for this particular product, and now that we have a video mapped to that specific product, let's serve that video that really brings to life the product that we know that the user has high propensity to purchase. " Uh we recently started a small pilot to test, you know, having a more complete mapping of videos to individual products and then being able to serve the video that's [clears throat] mapped to the product that our systems understand the user is going to be most likely to purchase. So, I'm just really bullish on the intersection of creatives and the Google Merchant Center. And feel free to use the Google Merchant Center to your creative benefit so that you don't have to actually lean on your creative to convey certain messages because your GMC feed is updated and high fidelity to actually convey a lot of that information on its own. I want to talk about testing. Obviously, the days of old of strict AB testing have um been evolving and we have new tools like um ad variations, asset experiments, and I want to hear from you both how advertisers should be thinking about their asset testing in their various campaigns. So, why don't we start with you, Charles? I think testing is really important part of the creative development life cycle because it allows you to like actually measure against your performance goals how investing in your creative uh leads to the performance that you want to see. And so, you can do that through things like you mentioned, Jenny, like ad variations in search or now like in PMAX, there's the ability to now actually directly AB test uh additional creatives or two sets of creatives against each other and you can get a quantitative measure of how the investments in your creative are actually driving the performance you want to see and get those learnings to bring back to improve your creative development process. And so, I think it's a critical piece of the life cycle that, you know, everyone should be thinking about testing um and not just testing between two assets, but also testing adding in automation and seeing what adding automation does to the performance of the campaign. Great. How about you, Sarah? I'm really excited uh about the PMAX asset comparison experiments launch um and how that's rolling out and uh helping advertisers more directly. And I'm very excited that will be coming to Demand Gen uh later this year. I think the ability to um test has always existed, uh but the ease of use has been missing. And we've heard that feedback um loud and clear and I think what advertisers will see as they start to play with the asset comparison experiments feature in P-Max and later in Demand Gen is that this is a really guided experience, um, to allow for good AB setups where your learnings are going to be valid and, um, you'll be able to isolate truly down to the creative as the only factor that's changing A versus B. Yeah, and stay tuned for GML for even more, uh, in that space. In wrapping up, I have one question for each of you. Um, Charles, I'd love to hear more about reporting and, um, where you're seeing, um, the team focusing in terms of like bringing transparency to how your assets are actually performing. Yeah. I think transparency in the way that AI is acting on your behalf is really important. And so that's why we've been spending a lot of time investing in adding more and more transparency to things like AI Max and P-Max. And so one of the ways you'll see this show up for creatives is we just started rolling out more stats for final URL expansion reporting. So before in

search, you would only have, uh, impression stats or in P-Max, you'd only have conversion stats. Now you have the full suite of stats available for every title and URL combination in both search and P-Max for all final URL reporting. Now is a great time to begin that testing cycle for adding in AI Max or asset optimization in P-Max or in Demand Gen to your campaigns to see how that performance is going to lift and to see how AI is going to act on your behalf. Great. Thank you. And Sarah, question for you um, looking at think of the demand gen and P Max. We talk a lot about reaching potential customers across all stages of that buying journey from discovery to purchase. Um love to hear from your point of view how advertisers should be thinking about their creative assets for each stage of the customer journey and how that should be structured and represented. I think a lot of people think about YouTube as a place for brand advertising and you know, YouTube is the new TV and there's a very good reason for that understanding and that equivalence. But YouTube over the last year two has become a really effective performance driver and of course by performance we mean deep conversions think add to cart eventual sales as well. And so what I'd like everybody to take away is that even if you are optimizing for those deep conversions and that bottom of the funnel performance, there may be different audiences that you're going after and those audiences are going to resonate with very different creative messages. In demand gen, it's going to be a different message to really lock in with a customer who's perhaps never even heard of your brand. So I would think about your audience first and foremost and the job that really needs to be done with the asset in terms of driving that purchase, driving that add to cart. Perhaps it's somebody who's new to your brand or somebody who's already quite familiar. How does that translate into the creative? Great. Thank you. Thank you both. This has been really terrific. Also excited to hear more about what's to come at GML. You've given us several teasers there Um, and thank you both again for your insights into all things creative. Of course, Jenny. I always love talking about creative. Thanks, Jenny. Thanks to Charles and Sarah for breaking down creative's evolving and central role in driving performance. I know there's skepticism about how much control advertisers really have in an AI-driven world. Today's conversation highlighted that your intuition and your brand voice are as important as ever. Here are my three top takeaways from our talk. One, ad strength is a diagnostic tool, not a performance report. So, you want to use it as a metric to identify headroom for discovery, not a pass-fail on asset effectiveness. Two, lean into this advertiser-in-the-loop control. So, automation does not mean sacrificing brand fidelity. You can now use solutions like text guidelines to steer AI content and tools like VO to generate video while maintaining your brand's voice. And three, breadth matters, and we've talked about this in our previous episodes, but to reach a diverse um adverse set of searchers, you want to create as much variety as possible in your assets. This includes using multiple RSAs and landing pages in an ad group when possible, as Charles mentioned, and swap out assets that aren't winning auctions. All right, action items. So, one, explore Asset Studio. It's found under Tools in Google Ads, and this is your place to create generative assets, edit your images, your videos, and manage your shared asset library. And two, check out Asset Experiments in PMax. This is what Sarah mentioned, where you can A/B test different versions of the same asset type and measure what's driving performance. So, stay tuned also for this coming to Demand Gen. Please keep your feedback and questions coming. Look for the companion Ads Decoded newsletter on the Google Ads LinkedIn page a day or so after this first airs. Drop questions there in the comments or send an email to adsdecoded@google. com. And lastly, we've got some exciting news. Google Marketing Live is coming up on Wednesday, May 20th and our next

episode will air on the live stream after the keynotes. I'll be sitting down with some of our keynote speakers to unpack the announcements. You can register at googlemarketinglive. com. As always, thanks for tuning in.